Swords & Wizardry Light - Forum

Sunday, February 24, 2013

Classic Dragon, Polyhedron, Ares Magazines (Others) Available for Free Download



Now, I have no idea about the legality of the uploaded works at the following link, but I do know about the quality of the articles in these out of print - alright, defunct - periodicals. Overall, extremely high quality. Get them here. (I assume the legality is a "gray" area on many of these titles)

Hey, look, Omni Magazine is there too. As is Cracked! Awesome!

(Edit: Also The General and The Space Gamer!)

10 comments:

  1. Web proxies ban, couldn't load it.

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  2. Excellent, Ares was always an interesting magazine.

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  3. Polyhedron is missing many of the side issues though...

    (Side issue - material put out that didn't coincide with running subscription list)

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  4. Hate to say it, but this is probably illegal.

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    1. I'm hearing that periodicals can be archived for library purposes. In theory, if you are DL'ing these mags, you are doing so for scholastic / research purposes.

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    2. then again, we have this little piece from Wikipedia:

      Omni magazine

      In a story at his Web site headed "What the heck is going on at Internet Archive?", author Steven Saylor noted, “Sometime in 2012, the entire run of Omni magazine was uploaded (and made downloadable) at Internet Archive.... Since those old issues must contain hundreds of works still under copyright by numerous contributors, how is this legal?"[24] At least one contributor to the magazine, author Steve Perry, has publicly complained that he never gave permission for his work to be uploaded ("they didn't say a word in my direction")[25], and it has been noted that all issues containing the work of Harlan Ellison have apparently been taken down.[26]

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  5. They have the entire run of Starlog, as well!

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  6. As a library, the Internet Archive can have the archive, but distribution without any kind of limits seems maybe problematic.

    It's not so clear say from WotC perspective either - except for stuff written by TSR / WotC employees, the contents of things like Dragon articles are still officialy the property of the contributing authors, as they only agreed to give first North American publishing rights.

    And, up until 1985 or so, Dragon was officially a separate company than TSR (TSR had to pay them to run advertising for instance).

    Harlan Elison is from the REAL OLD SCHOOL of writing to pay for food when he was young, so he is known to be viscious in defense of his rights, and has the money and lawyers on retainer to be agressive about it.

    So I suppose until somebody with an airtight legal claim and the lawyers to back it up takes some action, there they will stay.

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  7. You know if they were able to make them readable but not downloadable I doubt there could be any legalities. This would be just like finding th magazine and reading it in a library. Still cool though!

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  8. This is a slap in the face to the authors of the material in Dragon magazine. I know a lot of online people are jumping on this, but the small authors are going to have the hardest time protecting their work. These people hosting this are bastards that hurt the small-time writers more than anyone else. They might be too stupid or uncaring to understand this, but I hope people wake up to the fact that this is theft and not something 'cool' at all.

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